Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that I’ve been randomly italicizing words, putting emphasis on them for no apparent reason. No, the reason I stopped reading A Memory Called Empire a mere 22% of the way through is… a lot simpler. The plot embedded into all of that setting detail is actually fairly gripping, moves at a nice fast pace, and the book itself doesn’t seem too long, unlike many chunky SFF novels. The second reason I might have stopped reading A Memory Called Empire is that it’s one of those genre novels that’s at least 70% world-building, with lots of supposedly fascinating digressions to discuss the poetry, history and language of the book’s setting, and my thoughts on that issue have been exhaustively detailed.īut to my surprise, this was once again not really an issue. Martine doesn’t go completely hog wild with the science fictional aspects like some SF authors do, which keeps things feeling relatable and grounded. Books like this, which are set millenia into the future and depicting human cultures that are so divergent from ours that they may as well be fantasy are usually a non-starter.īut this didn’t actually bother me as much as I thought it would. I prefer my SF softer and smaller scale anything that’s set more than a century from the present day or outside of our solar system tends to lose my interest fairly quickly. The first reason is that I’m just generally not a fan of space opera or space opera-esque sci-fi. Going into Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, there were a few reasons I thought I wasn’t going to finish it.
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